Glossary of the monetization of a website

Affiliate program

Affiliate programs allow merchants to promote their products and webmaster to make money on a cost per action basis (unlike Adsense that is based on clicks).
The webmaster makes money only when visitors perform an action, as buying a book for example. Partners of the webmaster are the producer (Amazon for example) or an affiliate network.

Arbitrage

Trick to diverting advertising to obtain artificially revenues. This is a campaign AdWords (or other advertiser) to bring visitors to pages containing only Adsense advertisements (or other). The AdWords advertisements are set for a very low cost per click while the advertisements on the site to which they lead have higher incomes.
Adsense accounts using arbitration are disabled by Google since June 2007.

Clickjacking

With the help of a malicious script, generating unintended clicks from the user to unveil information or make choices that will benefit the agent.
This is different from fraudulent click that is a deliberate action of the user.

Contextual advertisement

An ad is contextual when it is choosen by the service, the Adsense robot
in this case, to match the content of the page. Practically the robot searches
for keywords in the page and select ads targetted to these keywords.
Actually the targetted keywords are not taken in the text of the ad, they
are choosen by the Adword customer that is the source of the ad.

CTR

Clickthrough Rate. This is the ratio of clicks related to the number of impressions
(displays).
Technically, it is number of clicks an ad makes divided by the number of displays
of either
- the ad or
- the ad unit or
- the page,
depending the type of impressions.

eCPM

Effective CPM, cost per thousand. The formula is the incomes for a channel,
divided by the number of thousand impressions.
Example:
- Gained: $5
- Impressions: 3500
- eCPM = 5 / 3.5
The result is $1.42

Fraudulent click

This is a category of invalid click. It may be a click of a publisher (the webmaster of the site that displays ads) on its own ads. This can be done manually or by a script. This also
includes incentive to click on ads, clicks from relatives or
generally anything that is done to increase revenues without any
benefit for advertisers.

Google Slap

See Low landing page quality score.

Incentives to click

This is the set of action the user could make to let visitors to click on
the ads. This is forbidden and lead the account to be disabled. The simplest
incentive is a message saying directly to help the webmaster thank to the
ads. But less evident actions are prohibited too. An image near an ad for
example is too. Any things that could make bad clicks, i.e. clicks that do
not lead true visitors to the targetted site are incentives.

Invalid click

According to the Adsense blog:
"Invalid clicks correspond to a category of clicks that we have chosen
not to charge our AdWords advertisers because they artificially
increase costs for an advertiser or a publisher's earnings."
Not to be confused with fraudulent clicks. In effect they can have various reasons and they always increase costs without benefit to the advertiser. They are not counted.

Landing page quality score (Adwords)

Quality score of a page. When the ads leads to pages with poor content, the publisher is rated a low landing page quality score. His Adwords account could be disabled. This is evaluated by robots.

MFA

Made For Adsense is a page or a site created solely for displaying advertisements. These pages have little or no content, containing only ads, it has a high click rate. The Adsense rules prohibit the ads on pages with no content. It can also refer to the MFA automatically generated pages such as search results.

Publisher

It is the website that displays the ads. (The advertiser makes them). Google is the ad server.

Referals

Referrals are non-contextual ads. Actually there are ads choosen by the user,
unlike contextual ads that are choosen by the service, and clicks do not make
money. The amount is fixed and is given only when the visitor performs some
action: downloading a software, registering a service...

ROI

Return on Investment. For a client of Adwords, the ROI is the score of the
value to his business gained in return for the cost of the ad campaign. Technically
it is the ratio of the cost of the campaign relative to money made with conversions
of clicks. In return, the ROI is used to modify incomes from Adsense clicks
for a given account depending the quality of the clicks.
The formula is: (Revenue of conversion - Cost of campaign) / Cost of campaign.Reference.